Situationist International
After CoBrA Constant's work becomes more abstract. Back in Amsterdam in the summer of 1952 he develops an interest in spatial architecture and three-dimensional work. With Aldo van Eyck, whom he met during his CoBrA time, he creates a space for the exhibition 'Man and House' at the Urban Museum Amsterdam from 1952-1953. In 1954 he works on a project with Gerrit Rietveld. Together they create a model house for warehouse de Bijenkorf.
In 1952 Constant receives a scholarship from the Art Council of Great Britain to study in London for three months. There he meets, amongst others, Henri Moore, Anthony Hill, Kenneth Martin, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Roger Hilton and Victor Pasmore. He experiences the artclimate in London as very welcoming. Opposed to Paris he feels that art is judged more objectively. Constant lives near Kensington Gardens and walking through the bombed city every day he starts to wonder how people live and how cities should be build. His stay in London raises his awareness how the constructions that surround us influence us. He notices how modern constructions are mostly practical and immensely dull and provide no room to develop a playful and creative lifestyle.
In the summer of 1956 Asger Jorn invites Constant to Alba, Piëmonte Italy, for a congress dedicated to 'Industry and the Fine Arts' initiated by 'Mouvement pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste' (International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus. At this congress Constant presents his lecture Demain la poésie logera la vie in which he pleads for a free architecture which stimulates a creative lifestyle instead of impeding it. The Lettrist International are also at the congress and they plead for a unitary urbanism (the synthesis of art and technology). Later that year Constant visits Debord in Alba, which proves to be an inspiration to both. In 1952 Debord founded the 'Lettrist International', he is a writer, film maker and strategic activist.
Debord wants to establish an even more radical movement which will totally abandon the arena of fine art and will solely focus on questions of psychography, a total dissolution of boundaries between art and life. In 1957 he and Asger Jorn bring together the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus and the Lettrist International by establishing the Situationist International. They specifically deny their status as an art movement.
Constant does not join the SI just yet. He objects to the SI on the grounds that the movement seems to be established mainly by artists who have their own interest at heart more than a common goal. When the group openly pleads for 'unitary urbanism', as defined by Constant and Debord, Constant joins the SI. An intensive correspondence between him and Debord follows. Constant writes several theoretical articles for the French SI journal and stages events at several musea in Paris as well as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where he shows his New Babylon series in 1959.
The success of the New Babylon show in 1959 prompts the SI to plan a group exhibition there also for April–May 1960. This exhibition will never take place. Disagreements in the group result in a split and several expulsions. In 1960 Constant leaves the group for the same reason he initially objected to joining. By 1961 no-one remains of the original artistic core except Debord himself.
Read more about this topic: Constant Nieuwenhuys